IV
He folded up the list and glanced about. There were about fifteen to twenty men and women in the saloon, all engaged in breakfasting or giving their orders to the stewards. To Frederick it seemed they were there for no other purpose than to spy upon his emotions.
The steamer had already been travelling for an hour on the ocean. The dining-room took up the full width of the vessel, and from time to time its port-holes were darkened by the waves dashing against them. Opposite Frederick sat a gentleman in uniform, who introduced himself as Doctor Wilhelm, the ship's physician. Straightway a very lively medical discussion began, though Frederick's thoughts were far away. He was debating with himself how he should act at his first meeting with the Hahlströms.
He tried to find support in self-deception, telling himself he had boarded the Roland, not for the sake of little Ingigerd Hahlström, but because he wanted to see New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Yellowstone Park, and Niagara Falls. That is what he would tell the Hahlströms—that a mere chance had brought them together on the Roland.
He observed that he was gaining in poise. Sometimes, when the adorer is at a distance from the object of his devotion, the idolatry of love assumes fateful proportions. During his stay in Paris, Frederick had lived in a state of constant fever, and his yearning for his idol had risen to an unendurable degree. About the image of little Ingigerd Hahlström, a heavenly aureole had laid itself, so compelling in its attraction that Frederick's mental vision was literally blinded to everything else. That illusion had suddenly vanished. He felt ashamed of himself. "I'm a ridiculous fool," he thought, and when he arose to go on deck, he felt as if he had shaken off oppressive fetters. The salt sea air blowing vigorously across the deck heightened his sense of emancipation and convalescence and refreshed him to his inner being.
Men and women lay stretched out on steamer chairs with that green expression of profound indifference which marks the dreaded seasickness. To Frederick's astonishment, he himself felt not the least trace of nausea, and only the sight of his fellow-passengers' misery caused him to realise that the Roland was not gliding through smooth waters, but was distinctly pitching and rolling.
He walked around the ladies' parlour, past the entrance of an extra cabin, and took his stand under the bridge, breasting the steely, salt sea wind. On the deck below, the steerage passengers had settled themselves as far as the bow. Though the Roland was running under full steam, it was not making its maximum speed, prevented by the long, heavy swells that the wind raised and hurled against the bow. Across the forward lower deck there was a second bridge, probably for emergency. Frederick felt strongly tempted to stand up there on that empty bridge.
It aroused some attention, of course, when he descended down among the steerage passengers and then crawled up the iron rungs of the ladder to the windy height. But that did not trouble him. All at once such a madcap spirit had come over him, he felt so happy and refreshed; as if he had never had to suffer dull cares, or put up with the whims of a hysterical wife, or practise medicine in a musty, out-of-the-way corner of the country. Never, it seemed to him, had he studied bacteriology, still less, suffered a fiasco. Never had he been so in love as he appeared to have been only a short time before.
He laughed, bending his head before the gale, filled his lungs with the salty air, and felt better and stronger.
A burst of laughter from the steerage passengers mounted to his ears. At the same instant something lashed him in the face, something that he had seen rearing, white and tremendous, before the bow. It almost blinded him, and he felt the wet penetrate to his skin. The first wave had swept overboard.
Who would not find it humiliating to have his sublime meditations interrupted in such a tricky, brutal way? A moment before, he felt as if to be a Viking were his real calling, and now, inwardly shaking and shivering, amid general ridicule, he crawled ignominiously down the iron ladder.
He was wearing a round grey hat. His overcoat was padded and lined with silk. His gloves were of dressed kid, his buttoned boots of thin leather. All these garments were now drenched with a cold, salty wash. Leaving a damp trail behind, he made his way, not exactly a glorious way, through the steerage passengers, who rolled with laughter. In the midst of his annoyance Frederick heard a voice calling his name. He looked up and scarcely trusted his eyes on seeing a large fellow in whom he thought he recognised a peasant from the Heuscheuer Mountains, a peasant with an evil reputation for drunkenness and all sorts of misdeeds.
"Wilke, is that you?"
"Yes, Doctor, I'm Wilke."
The little town in which Frederick had practised was called Plassenberg an der Heuscheuer, that is, Plassenberg by the Heuscheuer Mountains, a range in the county of Glatz where excellent sandstone is quarried. The people of the district loved Frederick both as a man and a physician. He was the wonder-worker who had performed a number of splendid cures and he was the human being, without pride of caste, whose heart beat warmly for the good of the lowliest of his fellow-men. They loved his natural way with them, always cordial, always outspoken, and sometimes harsh.
Wilke was bound for New England to join his brother.
"The people in the Heuscheuer," he said, "are mean and ungrateful."
Shy and distrustful at home, even toward Frederick, who had treated him for his last knife wound on his neck, his manner here, with the other passengers crossing the great waters, was frank and trustful. He was like a well-behaved child chattering freely.
"You didn't get the thanks you deserved, either, Doctor von Kammacher," he said in his broad dialect, rich in vowel sounds, and recounted a number of cases, of which Frederick had not known, in which good had been repaid by evil tattle. "The people around Plassenberg are not fit for men like you and me. Men like you and me belong in America, the land of liberty."
Elsewhere, Frederick would have resented being placed in the same category as this rowdy, for whom, he recalled, the police were searching. But here he felt no indignation. On the contrary, he was pleasantly surprised, as if by an unexpected meeting with a good friend.
"The world's a small place," said Frederick, passing over the theme of ingratitude and the land of liberty, "the world's a small place. Yet I am surprised to see you here. But I'm wet to the skin, and have to go change my clothes."
On his way to the cabin, on the promenade deck, he encountered the blond captain of the Roland, Von Kessel, who presented himself to Frederick.
"The weather is not quite up to mark," he said by way of excuse for the little mishap on the lower bridge. "If you enjoy standing in front there, you'd better put on one of our oilskins."
Now that the vessel's movement was more accentuated, the cabin, in which Frederick changed his clothes, was a problematical place of abode. The light came from a round port-hole of heavy glass. When the wall with the port-hole in it rose and turned inward like a slanting roof, the sunlight from a rift between the clouds in the sky fell upon the mahogany berth opposite. Sitting on the edge of the lower berth, Frederick tried to steady himself, holding his head bent to keep from striking against his upper berth, and frantically endeavouring not to follow the receding movement of the wall behind. The cabin was rolling in unison with the vessel's movement. Sometimes it seemed to Frederick as if the port-hole wall were the ceiling, and the ceiling the right wall; then again as if the right wall were the ceiling, and the ceiling the port-hole wall, while the actual port-hole wall, as if inviting him to jump, shoved itself at right angles under his feet—during which the port-hole was wholly under water and the cabin in darkness.
It is no easy matter to dress and undress in an oscillating room. That the vessel's motion could have changed so markedly within the one hour since he left the cabin, astonished Frederick. The simple operation of drawing